The other side of the argument was equally trenchant. As Edmund Burke put it in the Commons, few could have envisaged the human miracle that had happened in North America in little more than a century. He asked his fellow MPs to imagine themselves transported to the year 1700. Now, look westwards, across the Atlantic:
There is America -- which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men an uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life.
Garrard, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018
